Summary

Digital cameras have made it easy to capture and transmit digital pictures. Today, news photographers can send a stream of pictures to arrive at a picture editor’s desk when covering just one story. For news photo agencies, there is now a daily flood of images to deal with, from their own staff photographers, other news photo agencies and freelancers, from all over the world. Just anybody with a digital camera can send in pictures. How is it possible to handle all these pictures? Fortunately, through good strategic planning and development, there are two sets of information that are already an integral part of all standard JPEG [1] picture files that can greatly help the workflow. They are commonly known as the EXIF [2] data ‘header’ and the IPTC [3] data ‘header’. EXIF data is information about the camera, the lens and camera settings used in capturing each picture and is automatically written by the camera to the JPEG file at the same moment in time as it writes the picture data. IPTC data, on the other hand, is information entered by the photographer or editor after taking the picture – a description of who or what is in the image, the photographer’s name, copyright information, job ID etc. While both the EXIF and the IPTC header information normally remain hidden when viewing the picture, their importance and contribution to the news business is crucial. IPTC data can be considered as ‘asset management’ data. This supplementary data has recently been expanded and updated to further streamline the workflow of news photos and better manage a newspaper’s digital assets. Since its introduction almost 15 years ago, the importance of the IPTC metadata has become well accepted. EXIF data, in comparison, is greatly undervalued. EXIF data is ‘production’ data that promises much higher levels of automation of image processes including colour management, rational tone curve adjustments for landscape, portrait or night scenes, picture noise removal and sharpness enhancement. This opens a new door for very advanced colour repro – something much more advanced than colour management systems today. The important message is that to take advantage of the IPTC and the EXIF metadata, newspapers and magazines need to have compatible software to access them. This includes picture browsers and picture desks, picture processing software, production systems and archiving systems. EXIF metadata is so undervalued that many news agencies and picture sources currently remove such data so that the image file conforms to an older JPEG standard – one that can be read by the oldest and simplest of image handling software. Such retrograde action kills progress. These metadata are absolutely necessary for modern picture workflows. Adobe’s Photoshop and Apple’s and Microsoft’s file management systems are already designed to read and use IPTC and EXIF metadata. It’s the only way forward for greatly improving both the quality and speed of picture reproduction.